Audio to MIDI in Ableton Live

First: should you use Live’s own conversion?

Live has Convert Harmony / Melody / Drums to New MIDI Track built in, on the right-click menu of an audio clip. If your audio is already in a Live set, start there — it is one click and it knows your project tempo.

Come back here when:

• The audio is not in a Live set and you do not want to import it just to convert it.
• You want to hear the transcription against the original, and adjust sensitivity and note length, before anything lands in your project.
• You are on Intro or Lite, where the Convert commands are not available.
• Live’s result is too busy and you want to strip short notes and merge doubled onsets before importing.

Export a clean source from Live

1. Solo the track you want. One instrument converts far better than a mix.
2. Set the loop brace over four to eight bars and use File → Export Audio/Video with Rendered Track set to that track.
3. Render at 44.1 kHz WAV. Leave any reverb or delay off if you can — tails smear note onsets, which is the single biggest cause of extra notes.
4. Note your project tempo. You will set it in the converter.

Convert

1. Drop the WAV into the converter.
2. Select the section you want — up to sixty seconds per run.
3. Use the Original / MIDI switch while it plays. Loop the selection and listen for wrong pitches rather than watching the piano roll.
4. Set tempo to your Live project tempo before you export.
5. Download the .mid.

Import into Live

Drag the .mid file from your file browser straight onto a MIDI track in Session or Arrangement view. Live creates a clip with the notes in it.

Two things worth knowing:

• Live keeps your project tempo and warps the imported notes to it. If the file’s tempo was wrong, the notes arrive at the wrong spacing — fix the tempo in the converter and re-export rather than stretching the clip.
• A multi-track .mid would land on several tracks; this converter always exports one track, so you get one clip.

Point the track at any instrument — Wavetable, Operator, a sampler, an external synth. The MIDI carries pitch, timing, length and velocity, so dynamics from the original performance survive.

Common problems

• Notes drift out of time as the clip plays. Tempo mismatch between the exported file and your set.
• A cloud of short notes. Reverb or a noisy source. Raise minimum note length, and re-render the audio dry.
• Melody is right, harmony is missing. Expected on anything dense. Convert each instrument separately if you can get at the stems.
• Notes an octave out. An overtone read as a fundamental. Narrow the pitch range and convert again, or transpose the offending notes in Live.

Afterwards

Treat the result as a draft of the part, not a finished MIDI performance. The work that remains — fixing note ends, deleting artefacts, adjusting velocity — is normal, and it is still much faster than playing the part in again from scratch.